House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) tapped Rep. Peter Hoekstra on Wednesday to head the House Intelligence Committee during a period likely to see considerable reform and turmoil in the nation’s intelligence agencies.
Hoekstra (R-Mich.) will replace Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), whom President Bush recently nominated as director of the CIA.
Standing inside the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, a site chosen because it is a potential terrorism target, Hastert called intelligence reform “critical to our nation’s security” and urged Hoekstra to provide reform proposals before this session of Congress ends.
Hoekstra said he is likely to follow the recommendation of the independent Sept. 11 commission and support the idea of a national intelligence director.
“The key is how we will structure that position and the kinds of authorities that we will give that person,” he said. “I think that also there is a growing consensus that this person is going to have to have real authority.”
President Bush has endorsed the call for a national intelligence director, but with less authority than the Sept. 11 commission envisioned.
Hoekstra declined to comment on a sweeping plan put forward this week by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), saying he had not reviewed it. Roberts has recommended that Congress dismantle the CIA and remove several large intelligence agencies from the Pentagon’s control.
Leading Democrats as well as anonymous CIA officials immediately attacked Roberts’ plan, saying it marked an untenable shift during wartime.
Intelligence reform became a hot-button issue embraced by both parties soon after the July 22 release of the final report of the Sept. 11 commission. The intelligence community has also been criticized for saying that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction–an assertion that has gone unproven in the 17 months since the U.S.-led invasion.
Former CIA Director George Tenet resigned in June.
Hoekstra’s appointment comes at a time “when probably the most important intelligence bill in 30-plus years is about to be written,” said Michael Franc, vice president of government relations at the Heritage Foundation.
“Not only is Congress about to embark on the most important intelligence bill in the past 30 years, it’s doing it in an environment where there is a must-pass mentality,” Franc said.
Hoekstra, 50, immigrated to the U.S. from the Netherlands as a child and was an executive at an office furniture company before being elected to Congress in 1992. Since joining the Intelligence Committee in 2001, he has built a reputation as a conservative thinker suspicious of government bureaucracy.
In dealing with intelligence reform, Hoekstra will face entrenched agencies less than eager for change, said George Friedman, chairman of Strategic Forecasting Inc., a private intelligence firm.
“It’s going to be an incredibly volatile time,” he said. “You have the election, you have the war. . . . Congress is pushing for major reform, and the senior leaders of the intelligence community are resisting.”
Hoekstra likely will find himself playing mediator, not only between Congress and the intelligence community, but between Democrats and Republicans and between members of his own party, Friedman said.
“This is not a partisan issue. There are people on both sides of the aisle taking different positions,” he said.
